So he climbed on rapidly toward the glittering banks of snow until he reached a small plateau gleaming like a jeweled robe in the sunlight. Beneath him lay the little valley about the shaft, scarred by the ore pits with their abandoned rock piles. Far down, the old miner was leading the horses from the shed where they had been tied. Above beckoned the peaks, reaching into the steely heavens like naked icicles. A broad-winged bird circled majestically, tracing its dark shadow on the gleaming snow field, as with a brush.
Not a sound upon the earth nor in the sky! A broad, deep silence! The clear light, the lofty peaks pointing heavenward—nothing more, except his own beating heart!
The man stood there in the immense silence, his soul poised like the hawk above his petty world, surveying in one swift rush of thought that little self of his past, with its small ambitions and desires. Up to this level the road that Krutzmacht had opened for him had led.
He gazed steadily upward into the wonderful sea of blue sky, deeper than the blue depth of the Gulf Stream, above the snowy peaks, beyond the world, into his future. What he saw there was a vision of will, man’s will. He was all will—a vitalized mass of glorious energy to conceive, to create, to do!
He laughed in the cloudless amplitude of snow and blue heavens, laughed at the small self he had left behind, writing play pieces, making tiny scenes for a tiny stage. The world was the great stage upon which he would present his masterpiece! Krutzmacht had played on that stage, and Brainard had helped him to put up a rousing melodrama at the close. His own play thereon should be something different.
Krutzmacht’s will had made the fortune; his will should take it, if need be, reshape it, and speed it to some more perfect end than the old buccaneer of the West had ever dreamed of. Where Krutzmacht’s will had ended, his will would start.
There rose, too, a vision of art as he had felt it in Paris at dawn, beneath the towers of the old cathedral. And sweetly the two united in his fecund mind. He laughed softly in the joy of this vision, and his laugh tinkled strangely among the silent mountain peaks. Throwing up his head to the dazzling rampart of snow that broke the wavering azure lines of the heavens, he exclaimed:
“That, too, will come true! That will be! We’ll make life our stage, and write the play in life, as God writes upon the snows up here. That is creation!”
Brainard could see the old man below holding the horses by their bridles and shielding his eyes with his free hand, as he searched for his companion. And faintly, very thinly, through the valley came the old man’s hail.
Brainard gave a last, lingering look to the immensity above, beyond, around him—the place where his great idea had been born. Then he turned his steps downward, the light of distant thoughts in his eyes, a smile upon his lips which said: